News, views and musings from the Adobe UK team

Document based challenges dents bottom line by as much as €11,700 annually per employee

Digital technology has disrupted every industry and geography, revolutionising how office workers today create, produce and manage their work. As more and more employees work remotely and teams span the globe it can often lead to a feeling that all of their time is spent searching, editing and collaborating on documents, rather than their actual day jobs. At the same time IT departments are having to integrate and manage the many different platforms, devices and services workers are demanding, all while protecting sensitive corporate IP and personal information.

While these struggles are well-recognised, we wanted to try and actually quantify their impact on organisations. It was with this in mind that we partnered with IDC to build a better understanding of office and IT workers’ needs and challenges in the modern day workplace and the financial impact this has on organisations in terms of bottom line.

The results were surprising: we all know time is being wasted, but the cost of that wasted time reaches an eye-watering, €11,700per information worker annually! This was calculated by looking at things like the challenges related to personal productivity – such as searching for, but not finding, documents; inefficiencies in collaboration between individuals and companies, and barriers to working on new platforms such as mobile and tablet.

For businesses, the key to closing the gap is to recognise that it is a set of compounding issues: lots of little things that add up to a big impact on employee productivity, and ultimately, the bottom line. The features that we’ve introduced in Acrobat XI – shipping today – equip office workers and IT departments with document collaboration tools that not only increase efficiency through the document creation, management and distribution process, and protect sensitive information, even when documents travel outside of the document management system and corporate firewall.

Our infographic below highlights some of the other findings from IDC’s whitepaper, and below that you can check out an overview of the all the new features of Acrobat XI to see how it’ll allow you to work smarter, not harder.

Work with PDF files across tablets and smartphones in touch-friendly Adobe Reader to annotate and add comments, as well as fill in, sign and save forms.

Save PDF documents as PowerPoint, Word or Excel files or reuse parts of or entire PDF files as Microsoft Office documents and web pages without retyping or need to reformat.

The new and improved IT features and functionality now enable IT professionals to:

Standardise on an easy to use, full-featured, consistent and trusted PDF Reader now with full support for iPads and Android tablets.

Integrate Adobe Acrobat XI seamlessly with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint, enabling users to do more with PDF in an Office or SharePoint environment.

Streamline deployment and maintenance with free Adobe tools to aid configuration and installation, as well as enhanced support for Microsoft SCCM/SCUP and Apple Remote Desktop.

Help mitigate risk and protect systems and data with industry-leading security technology, in addition to the Adobe PDF Whitelist Framework, allowing selective enablement of JavaScript for both Windows and Mac OS.